


They had light inside their eyes

by NotMyOrthonym



Series: Whitestone, Dead Hearts [3]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: just a really short little thing, they have a complicated relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 17:17:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8293685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotMyOrthonym/pseuds/NotMyOrthonym
Summary: Cassandra finds a present from Percy.





	

He leaves her a little wind-up toy before he leaves on his latest adventure. He leaves it on her desk in her room, and she could yell at him for entering without her permission, but he’s not here so she doesn’t. She’ll be happy enough to see him alive and well when he comes back that she’ll forget to yell at him for it. 

Percy wasn’t her favorite brother, she thinks. She can’t quite remember who was, she think it changed every week. You’re not supposed to have favorite siblings, her mother had always said. Stop trying to make your brothers fight, her father had thrown in. But she’d had four, and it was impossible to love all of them equally. She’d loved them all, of course, but she’d loved some more than others. It was the natural order of things. 

She doesn’t know if she was his favorite sister. He’d had three, after all, and she’d been so much younger than him. She’d been an annoying one, too. She remembered that. 

She also remembers his present to her on her tenth birthday. It was a beautiful little flying machine, a little crude, but she remembers that you just had to wind it up very tight and then flip a little lever and this thing of beautiful twisted metal and just a bit of colored glass would shoot up into the air and whiz around above your head for up to ten minutes if you wound it up tightly enough. She would set it spinning into the air in the receiving hall and chase it around trying to catch it. Once she got bored of that, she used to wind it up quite tight and then quickly release it into one of her siblings’ rooms and run away very quickly, laughing wildly at their indignant shrieks. She’d taught Percy to regret giving it to her when she started doing that with his workshop. He threatened more than once to take it away from her, but the toy always made its way back to her, sometimes in better shape than when it left. 

She broke it eventually, as she was always going to. She’d released it at the top of a staircase and tried to beat it to the bottom. She’d nearly broken her arm, slipping down the stairs, and she had lost the race because of it. She thinks her family was really quite glad that it had wound up smashed to bits at the bottom of the stairs. She’d been a menace with it, really. 

On Winters Crest that year, he gave her a little thing that could climb up and down stairs and her whole family had groaned. But no matter how she managed to annoy him, and no matter that the toys rarely lasted two months, every gift from him was some delicately crafted little wind-up toy. No matter what. 

The little one on her desk twirls and sings when you wind it up. It’s an old song Julius used to sing to them all. She wonders how long he’s been working on it. 

She’s crying, somehow. She clutches the delicate little thing in her hands and presses her lips to them. She’s not a religious woman, but in that moment, she prays. She prays to whatever god is listening, Pelor, Sarenrae, the Raven Queen, whoever, that Percy will come home safe. That he will return to her. She loves him when he returns to her, and she wants to love him again. She wants to terrorize him with this somehow, wants to let it wreak havoc in his workshop again. She prays she will be able to fulfill the promise that this little toy symbolizes. 

_Please. Please, just let him return to me. Bring him back to me, please._

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing a lot of Cassandra's darker emotions and I just wanted to write something about her love for Percy, I guess.


End file.
